REVIEW: ‘Transformers One’ is better than Bay

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Check out this car trick. “Transformers One,” an energetic charmer by director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”), takes the brand that’s been, variously, a trinket from Japan, a Saturday morning kids’ show and a hyper-sexualized blockbuster franchise, and whip-whomp-whoops it into a cartoon about the human soul – er, make that a sentient robot’s spark plug – that the guileless bipedal worker bots on planet Cybertron have been told they were born without.

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Lacking their own glowing core, young energy miners Orion Pax (Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (Brian Tyree Henry) are unable to aspire to a better life – in short, to transform. When Orion, the more ambitious of the two, tried to pretzel himself into a Pontiac anyway, it didn’t go well. “Took me three days to pry you open,” D-16 groans.

This is a prequel. Orion and D-16 and their pals are fated to morph into characters you know, and the road there has some convincingly emotional turns. But really, the screenwriters Eric Pearson, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (yes, Ferrari) have stripped down the series’s nonsensical mythology – why in Henry Ford’s name would an alien species hanker to look like a Mack truck? – and rebuilt it around a purer philosophy. Here, the “auto” in Autobots stands for autonomy. Hey, whatever spins your wheels.

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The film’s style is a staggering improvement on the old ’80s TV show, and even on the Michael Bay live-action version, which, for all its expensive CGI, felt like being rattled around in a second-grader’s pencil box. Cinematographer Christopher Batty and the design team whisk us through an underground city named Iacon that’s marvellously cluttered with skyscrapers sprouting from below and above like stalagmites and stalactites, with floating roads that unfurl mid-chase as though predicting where someone will steer.

Early on, there’s a race that rumbles like the running of the bulls. Later, all these geometric angles are broken up by a flashback that whirls on-screen in a cloud of beautiful, soft dust.

When the low-status gang, now expanded by a line-toeing lady robot named Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and a goofy blabbermouth named B-127 (Keegan-Michael Key), finds itself for the first time on Cybertron’s surface, I had a thought that seemed at once plausible and absurd. Taking in its landscape of moody pastel skies and jagged spears of metal and rock overgrown by vines and purple-pink moss, I wondered: Is this Transformers movie inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky?

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Cooley, who also co-wrote “Inside Out,” makes sure his latest movie gets in at least one good dumb joke every scene, including a visual gag where Orion and D-16 appear to sleep upright in old-school portable phone chargers. In addition to hiring Jon Hamm and Steve Buscemi for this movie’s villains, someone in the production must have thought it was awfully funny to cast “The Matrix’s” Laurence Fishburne as an ancient gewgaw named Alpha Trion who, in an archived hologram, dramatically intones about a gizmo called the Matrix of Leadership.

That, of course, will be the thing everyone spends the film speeding around trying to find. The plotline unspools exactly as you’d expect, and it’s gory as heck. (If motor oil were blood, this PG cartoon would be rated NC-17.) But the surprise here is how much of the quest is spiritual, too – the story heavily invests in one character’s gradual heel turn, which feels like a tragedy long before the climactic smashup.

It’s not hard to imagine “Transformers One” connecting with preteens whose pubescent bodies can be as unwieldy as Orion’s first, clumsy transformation, with wheels where he expects legs and arms where he expects wheels. It might even radicalize them to vow they’ll never be a cog in a machine.

Three stars. Rated PG. At theatres. Contains sci-fi violence, animated action and language. 103 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.

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